This is the first heading of Scott's commentary on
Adaptation

Back in my high school days, I was introduced to
the concept of self-referential sentences. Douglas Hofstadter's
book "Metamagical Themas" has several essays on the subject. Some of
the sentences there are simple, like "This sentence has five words."
Some are a bit more intense, cataloging their letter and punctuation
counts. If you really want to have your mind blown by self-
referentiality, you can either read David Moser's This Is The Title Of This Story, Which Is Also
Found Several Times In The Story Itself, or you can watch
Adaptation.
I thought I knew precisely how strange director
Spike Jonze
and writer
Charlie Kaufman
could be based on
Being John Malkovich,
but Adaptation surpasses even that. Imagine Being John Malkovich's
complexity of premise combined with the non-linearity of
Memento.

Kaufman has done a peculiar and delicious thing with
Adaptation. The movie is about the adaptation of a book into a movie.
We see the final movie usually before we see the writer writing it. The
catch is that the writer has become part of the story. There is no
distinction between the screenplay as we see it being created on screen
and what we see on screen. Like Being John Malkovich, we get to
seriously bend our ideas of identity while watching. Unlike Malkovich,
there's no bizarre sci-fi twist to it, just a story about the
telling of itself. Almost every aspect of the film is discussed in the
film itself. In one particularly funny scene, a long voiceover
narration is interrupted by a screenwriting teacher bellowing about
voiceover narrations being "flaccid, sloppy writing". The Kaufmann
character also has a brother, who is quite the alterego. There are
scenes where I wondered if Adaptation was building to a
Fight Club
denouement. The movie toys with these thoughts by having the brother
write a screenplay about a multiple-personality protagonist. PS: Stay
until the end of the credits for a wonderful gem from that screenplay.

This heading would nominally like to tell you about the
cast.

I can't think of a single bad casting decision for
Adaptation. In a stunning display of putting the same person on screen
more than once, there are dozens of shots that put two
Nicolas Cages
onscreen together. I know this kind of thing has been around for a
long time, but the quantity here is astonishing. Cage plays twin
brothers, and gives each of them nicely distinctive mannerisms such
that it's usually easy to separate them despite the perfect
appearance match. I'm sure some people will howl at this
comparison, but I found this to be another demonstration of the talents
Cage showcased in
Face/Off.
Meryl Streep
and
Chris Cooper
are both good in the Orchid Theif plot arc. Cooper gets to play a bit
of a goof, but he does so with utter conviction. Streep's character
isn't as colorful, but she brings out an excellent range of
emotions. I was delighted to see
Maggie Gyllenhaal,
who I've previous enjoyed in the trailer for
Secretary.
That's right, just the trailer.

Nitpicking

When
Donald and Charlie are in the car together, the car exhibits some
strange behavior. Most cars make a noise when the driver's door has
been opened and the key is still in the ignition. This car makes the
same noise when the passenger's door is open and the key is still
in the ignition. As Adaptation is not the most straightforward movie, I
took this as one more piece of evidence for the "does Donald exist"
argument.